Posts by Lauren Ipsum
It's also similar to Harry Potter and Divergent. Just as there was a rash of vampire/paranormal YA fiction after Twilight, there's currently a run on quasi-facist highly and arbitrarily segregated ...
The three-act or five-act structure can still exist even if the elements are not shown in order. It's the effect on the audience which is changed. In the case of Memento, you see the end first, an...
Things that are good are things which you liked, and elements which achieved what the writer was going for. Funny bits: anything which makes you laugh (which is clearly supposed to) Nice turns of...
Yes, you can develop secondary characters, and should to the extent your narrative has room. While they are multi-volume arcs, David & Leigh Eddings's Belgariad and Malloreon series are good ...
If it's really short — no more than a few paragraphs — set it off with italics. It should quickly become apparent from context who the first-person-italics character is. If it's pages and pages, ...
You don't ever use apostrophes to form plurals, so that's right out. If the Roman numeral is part of the name, you would add an S: A total of 15 Saturn Vs were built, but only 13 were flown. If ...
Just because The Crunch happens doesn't mean that your protagonists all lose. Yes, the obvious antagonist is The Crunch. But is that all your heroes are fighting? Is that all they're striving for?...
My opinion is that once you've published, even on Kindle, it's done. Other than typos or a gross mistake like using the wrong character name by accident, you don't make changes. Your story is you...
You're missing item 4, or 3a: "Here's another Good Thing which will allow us to win!" In your swordfighting example: I can put in the same kind of work they do and become as good as they are! ...
Remember that terms like "third person limited" are not meant to be jails. They are descriptive. If it works for your story to have one (or a handful) of scenes outside your protagonists' viewpoi...
Accents are not decorations. Have a reason for using them beyond "I'm writing a fantasy and they look cool." (The same goes for apostrophes.) In addition to Daniel's very good answer: An accent ...
1) Where's the best place to hide a red fish? In a pond full of other red fish. Since you're writing in a fantasy genre, you have liberty to create an entire society. You're doing all your own wor...
You should only attempt the style of the 17th/18th centuries if you're writing some kind of pastiche or mimicry of a book written then — for example, a Sense and Sensibility and Dragons kind of thi...
It depends on the context. It can be casual, but it's the correct past tense of "to get." I got sick. I got a book for my birthday. I got there in time. Perfectly correct, if slightly ca...
Speaking as an American who has limited familiarity with any version, I suggest King James, because that's the one the general American public would hear the most in passing outside a church contex...
@lew answered this when addressing this question: Is this an example of an unreliable narrator? From this Wikipedia article The Naïf: a narrator whose perception is immature or limited through...
An unreliable narrator is one who knows the truth but doesn't reveal it to the reader. It sounds like your story has a narrator who does not, in fact, know the truth. Dr. Watson is sometimes seen ...
I don't think there can be an answer for this. I don't think you can even have an answer for a given writer. Mercedes Lackey rewrote her first trilogy seventeen times, but now she churns out books ...
Create engaging characters and put them in situations with high stakes. The characters in your first chapter (or prologue) don't even have to be main characters. They don't even have to survive t...
I'll approach this from a different angle than the two great answers already here. Let's assume that yes, your story is too similar to an existing, fairly well-known property. How do you fix that? ...
In the BBC Sherlock fandom there are many lively discussions about how a lot of the story takes place in subtext: Person C is a "mirror" for Protagonist A, water symbolizes emotions, drinking tea m...
The extent to which you can do this varies depending on your audience, but generally, I wouldn't do it with a thoroughly unknown word. Tonitrus is an excellent example. Great word, means what you n...
It's a little convenient, but you can get around that a few ways: 1) Hang a lampshade on it. That is, have the characters point out that they found that other MacGuffin at the treasury too, and wh...
Digits tend to be read faster and are less important. Spelling out numbers takes longer to read and are emphasized. So there are two things to consider: 1) How do people think of dates? Do you thi...
Set off your part with some kind of identifier: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. ...
